Towards integrative gene functional similarity measurement

Background: In Gene Ontology, the "Molecular Function" (MF) categorization is a widely used knowledge framework for gene function comparison and prediction. Its structure and annotation provide a convenient way to compare gene functional similarities at the molecular level. The existing gene similarity measures, however, solely rely on one or few aspects of MF without utilizing all the rich information available including structure, annotation, common terms, lowest common parents. Results: We introduce a rank-based gene semantic similarity measure called InteGO by synergistically integrating the state-of-the-art gene-to-gene similarity measures. By integrating three GO based seed measures, InteGO significantly improves the performance by about two-fold in all the three species studied (yeast, Arabidopsis and human). Conclusions: InteGO is a systematic and novel method to study gene functional associations. The software and description are available at http://www.msu.edu/~jinchen/InteGO.